Thursday, September 26, 2013

On Empathy and What We Do ... Together

by
JONATHAN HSY

Hello ITM readers! I'm just on my way to the BABEL symposium
in NYC (#cla2013) by way of Oceanic New York
(#ony2013)—of course more about this on ITM after this weekend. But first, in
this posting, I'd like to quickly comment on a few buzzworthy online items that
might at first seem unrelated—but are actually intertwined by an important
common thread.

On Contingency: Earlier this month, MARY KATE returned to ITM with this thoughtful blog
posting entitled “On Contingency.” In a large part “giving props” to
her medievalist community during her time teaching at Yale, Mary Kate offers
one positive example of professional experience as an adjunct, and she
illustrates the importance of working in an environment in which one is valued
as a peer and well supported on all fronts (emotionally, intellectually, and
materially). I found it so striking that soon after Mary Kate’s posting, this truly
devastating “counterpoint” began to circulate regarding the experience of
Margaret Mary Vojtko, a dedicated teacher and adjunct professor of French at
Duquesne University for 25 years (see “Death of an adjunct” HERE). This
story has been picked up and re-circulated by the NPR, Huffington Post,
CNN, BuzzFeed (and
I’m sure many other outlets) generating righteous outrage—and sincere
discussions about the adjunctification of higher education continue to
reverberate online and in the corridors. The inherent pathos in this
story of the suffering of Margaret Mary Vojtko is not without a certain
literary (almost hagiographical) tinge: in some respects she becomes a kind of
modern-day “martyr” for the case against our profession’s increasing dependence
upon (or even exploitation of) contingent faculty. This concern about the
adjunctifation of higher education is something we've been thinking about quite
a lot on ITM: Jeffrey and Eileen, most noticeably, have attended to issues relating
to what Jeffrey has called the “precariat”; and see the comments
on Mary Kate’s posting by Ben Tilghman and Myra Seaman on their own experiences
as adjuncts and the need to find a “home” as a scholar, teacher, and fully
valued peer.

On
a related note, read Rebecca Schuman’s excellent posting on “Horrible Job-Market Platitudes and How to Retire Them,”
which provides some tips for mentors and job placement officers on avoiding
well-intentioned but ultimately unproductive words of “comfort” for people who
haven't landed tenure-track positions. Many of us who act as academic mentors
are products of a culture that still codes non-TT status itself as “failure”
and this posting goes one step toward changing some of these attitudes and
sentiments.

Declasse Academics: You may have seen this posting making the rounds over the past week on
"declasse" academics, a link I first saw posted by KARL on
Facebook (see the link by @WernherzBear HERE). In
this list, this blogger reveals a certain implicit assumption that all
academics come from a privileged (and Northeastern US) background. I feel many
items on this list don't quite apply to people of color and/or folks who grew
up outside of the US, but what this posting suggests is that unstated social
codes (i.e., the implicit norms of WASP culture) still underpin many
aspects of (North American) academia. Everyday interactions can make even
TT-faculty “insiders” feel like perpetual “outsiders,” people who
don’t “belong.” There are many ways in which people can feel “othered” in the
profession beyond class of course (gender, race, age, ethnicity, sexuality,
disability), but the posting draws attention to something we can be so reluctant
to discuss openly.

Serious Literature (No Women or Chinese): This is a much newer
story (really only “broke” yesterday and last night). I’m closely following the
ongoing reaction to a recent interview with David Gilmour—an author and
apparent literature instructor who (now notoriously) reveals he doesn’t “love”
literature by women or by “Chinese” (?!) and is instead most invested in
teaching works by “serious, heterosexual guys”—and the apology/interview making
up for the original interview didn’t help matters. I’m not linking to the
original interview or follow-up here, but you can see that the posting has
swiftly generated both online rage and mockery, with this spot-on parody HERE and response HERE, an awesome open letter by Anne Thérault HERE, and a devastating point-by-point
takedown HERE. The comments on the Facebook event page
for Serious Heterosexual Guys For Serious Literary
Scholarship (created by Miriam No, on twitter @imposterism) are pure
COMEDY GOLD (and track #SeriousReads and #GilmourReadMore on twitter RIGHT NOW for the ongoing University of Toronto community response).

On Empathy

So
what ties together all of these items? In his very insightful
response to the Gilmour story, early modern literature professor Holger
Syme offers these remarks on the importance of empathy:

Good
teaching requires empathy — an effort to understand things, ideas, and people
totally unlike you. Some of those people are your students. Some of those
things are of the past. Some of those ideas are the ideas of authors from
different cultures than yours, and yes, shockingly, even of a different gender.
Engaging with those people, things, and ideas is not just what research means,
and why research is necessary, it’s what reading is.

This
statement beautifully showcases how empathy is not only the key to good
teaching but also a feature of research and scholarship, including (as is the
case in medieval studies) people who seek to understand a culture or worldview
that is distant and “alien” to one's own. I would extend things to say that
empathy is, of course, a key part of human interaction in general -- which
includes one's treatment of students, mentees, and coworkers of all kinds
(regardless of rank, social affiliations, or employment status).

I
will end by stating why I believe that online communities like the ones
cultivated here at ITM and the BABEL Working Group—and other forms of social
media—are so very important. In a lot of cases, being a medievalist means being
“the only medievalist in the village” (so to speak), and in these instances
many turn to online venues a way to stay engaged with a broader community of
people who share their scholarly and intellectual interests. Moreover, the
field-specific isolation one might feel as a medievalist can certainly be
compounded and complicated by so many other factors (most noticeably,
contingent status). What I hope ITM and BABEL can continue to foster is this
genuine sense of community and support for people who might physically be far
apart, and I hope (collectively) we can create non-hierarchical forms of
community that not only think beyond discrete academic disciplines but also
break open the very idea of “the university” and the world that surrounds and
sustains it.

How could it be that I never commented on this, Jonathan? I returned to it in flight from Seattle to DCA and I want to say, thank you. Much of what you write was on my mind as I spoke with graduate students at a public university slowing defunding humanities endeavors and making their lives very difficult to maintain. I wish that university trustees and administrators were required to read this post.

@Robert: It seems the David Gilmour discussions have subsided as of late (with a brief flurry after Alice Munro was the first Canadian author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature!). ... I've seen Peter Buchanan's post and understand where he's coming from, even if I do think (in the particular case of Gilmour) that there's a *big difference* between someone in his position and a socially and socially disadvantaged contingent instructor like Margaret Mary Vojtko. While perhaps Holger Syme might have overstated things a bit in his blog post in order to convey the idea that Gilmour as an individual didn't speak "for" the English department as a whole, I still would agree with the overall message of the posting and what he writes -- toward the end -- about empathy.

@Jeffrey: Haha, I'm just seeing your comment now! do hope your trip to Seattle went well, and thanks -- I'm glad to know that others appreciate this posting , and these issues are things that all of us -- faculty (of all kinds), grad students, administrators -- need to keep in mind.